The Moral Machine

In 2014, MIT Media Lab launched an experiment called Moral Machine, a game-like platform to bring together a human perspective on moral decisions made by Artificial Intelligences executed in machines, such as autonomous cars. The mechanism is very simple: moral dilemmas are shown in which a car without a driver must choose the “best” of two very bad situations, such as killing two passengers or five pedestrians, and the participants in the experiment must decide which option they think is more acceptable… Something very interesting is that you can see your answers compared to the other users and even set your own scenarios.

The volume of participation in this experiment since it was launched in 2014 has been spectacular: millions of people from 233 countries, registering more than 40 million decisions, making it one of the largest studies ever conducted on global moral preferences. Nature has recently taken this data and presented a report that reveals very interesting conclusions about how ethics diverge depending on culture, economy and geographical location. Some of the conclusions are:

• Participants from collectivist cultures, such as China and Japan, are less likely to save the young than the old.
• Participants from poorer countries with weaker institutions are more tolerant of pedestrians crossing illegally than those who do it well.
• Participants from countries with a high level of economic inequality show greater gaps between the treatment of individuals with a high or low social status.
• Participants from individualistic cultures, such as the United Kingdom and the United States, placed greater emphasis on preserving more lives given all other options.
• Countries very close to each other also showed closer moral preferences, with three dominant groups: West, East and South.

The study has interesting implications for countries currently testing autonomous cars, as these preferences could play a role in the design and regulation of such vehicles. Car manufacturers may take into account, for example, that Chinese consumers would use self-driving cars that protect pedestrians.

Autonomous vehicles are likely to become commonplace in cities around the world in just a few years. Although the technological challenges inherent in the design of such cars and trucks are rapidly being overcome, the ethical issues that arise are far from being resolved and, in fact, may not be resolved in a way that is consistent with the current moral paradigms.

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